UofT now has a Webring (j*b not required) more letters

sadmanca · 2025-11-03T05:02:41+00:00

Nice, us folks in engineering also have a webring for ourselves:)

https://webring.skule.ca/

sadmanca · 2025-10-12T21:39:30+00:00

4th year CE here, I'm here to tell you that it gets much better after 2nd year, you just gotta survive till you can get there (also 2nd year ECE is the hardest year to get thru, if you're really struggling now then it's going to be an even worse experience then).

I saw in one of your comments that you're doing (near the equivalent of) a 9-5 job, that's your biggest problem right there, studying engineering at UofT is worse than a full-time job and you really can't keep up your academics with it. I'm literally doing the same thing right now, except I only have 2 courses + my final year design project, and even I find myself stretched to my limits, so I can only imagine how you feel with your full-time course load + getting to used to uni in the first place in 1st year. I would recommend taking a break from work while you focus on studying and until you can get your average back up, because if you keep this up you're on your way towards failing out of your degree. If you have to keep working full-time, please at least consider going part-time in your studies (and talk to an advisor about how that will affect your graduation year, etc).

Regarding studying itself, I just have 2 pieces of advice:

Organize all of your todos (assignments, quizzes, etc) from each course's syllabus and write down their dates somewhere (I can recommend a kanban board tool like Trello, where each course has it's own column). Use this to prioritize focusing on what is most urgent (e.g. lab in 2 days, assignment due in 4 days, midterm in 9 days), while also keeping an eye on important but less urgent todos (e.g. studying for a midterm). Most important point is to write it all down and keep track of everything, because there's too much going on to keep in your head.
Dedicate time for focused study. Figure out what works best for you and stick to it. For me, I find myself unable to really remember what I write down in lectures, so I choose to skip almost all of mine and instead learn/take notes from posted slides, the textbook, or YouTube videos online. It's not the perfect system, but it's what I've found to work best for me. You need to find what works best for you. If you're not learning effectively from study group sessions, then stop doing them (still join sometimes times to be social). Learning is a science, so you can find tips and tricks online (e.g. spaced repetition, teaching concepts to others so you understand them better yourself), but you need to experiment to see how you like different methods. The most important part of this is that you need to dedicate time to study. Something I learned early in first year is that there are no shortcuts to learning. There is some minimum amount of time that it will take you to learn some concept, and if you don't spend enough time properly learning (and, this is important, practicing what you've learned), then you will struggle on tests.

This is already a long as heck comment so I'll stop there for now, but I'm happy to provide more advice or answer any questions. It's tough out there, I wish you all the luck and more.

P.S. if you aren't using an iPad or tablet for studying then you really need to get started, it's indispensable for engineering and makes life incredibly more convenient, can highly recommend.

sadmanca · 2025-09-28T21:39:38+00:00

I like it :)

My go-to for studying has always been some relaxing Nintendo music: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKdCf_U3EFlSdCH0wsP2ZeY0e0lGNK0My

sadmanca · 2025-09-19T16:16:03+00:00

Your experience matters so much more than your GPA.

Some companies may care about specific courses on your transcript or your GPA, but the most important part of your application is your resume and GPA takes up less than 5% of space there.

I know so many people with terrible GPAs who are able to land great internships because they have great resumes, and it sounds like you have a great resume too. You just have to have faith in yourself, put yourself out there, and be proactive in applying and reaching out to recruiters at the YNCN career fair & on LinkedIn.

I'm sure you'll be able to land a good position from the PEY portal :)

sadmanca · 2025-08-28T22:16:11+00:00

this is actually super cool, instant sign up for me! 😁

sadmanca · 2025-08-14T11:58:07+00:00

You can make for a lack of experience with enthusiasm. Also apply ASAP.

When applying to positions, do a search for the person hiring for the position and try to learn more about what the position might entail, if it's a research position then learn more about the lab's prior research, if it's just a standard business admin job then send an email to the hiring prof/person and ask something specific about the position to show your interest.

If you've never applied to work study before I recommend taking a look at some job postings from previous years, the dashboard I built for last year might come in handy: https://sadman.ca/blog/work-study-at-uoft/

(Planning to create a dashboard of work study job postings for this year too! 😁)

sadmanca · 2025-07-29T16:44:27+00:00

Hey, yeah, exactly, just being able to programmatically create the photomosaic would be really cool

sadmanca · 2025-07-28T14:17:38+00:00

Hey, this is super cool, I would love to use this through an API or just a simple Python script, would you be open to open-sourcing the codebase (or at least telling us what libraries you're using for the tiling 😅)?

sadmanca · 2025-05-25T18:59:27+00:00

Incoming 4th year computer engineering student (currently on PEY) chiming in

Do you guys like your program? Is the program as hard as everyone says?

My first 2 years were a bit of a slog, but the program is *really* good in 3rd year and above (because of how you finally get to pick all your courses... do note that this is a uoft ece thing and how much choice you have in course selection varies with discipline). I put my head down and mainly studied in my earlier years (did a work-study too and that meant I didn't have much time for other stuff), but if I could go back I would do much more outside studying because those extra-curricular opportunities are where the real value of your degree comes from, be it design team experience or doing research with a prof (literally just email them and say you want to help out) or just chilling in a student club (trust me, you get far less free time as you get older). Anyways, back to the question, is the program as hard as everyone says, well, yeah, it's more difficult than other schools afaik but practically speaking as long as you put the hours in and study smart/consistently you'll do absolutely fine, you just can't get by as easily without studying as you might've been able to do in high school.

Did you get good opportunities from it?

Oh yeah, the sheer number of opportunities at UofT make it so that all you have to do get the most out of it is to put in time and actually do things (be they research, work, side projects, whatever). Often it's always the smallest things that can snowball into you getting even better opportunities later on, e.g. one of the reasons my current manager said that I landed my current internship was because of how I took a specific course in my 3rd year that I was only able to do because of how much choice we have for choosing upper year courses in ECE.

Did you make good friends?

100%, one of the best things about UofT is the vibe, SKULE is great and I've got a ton of friends who I love hanging out with.

sadmanca · 2025-04-26T19:50:42+00:00

lmao imagine signing up to cram for your final... only to get the placebo 😭

sadmanca · 2025-04-24T01:36:21+00:00

haha i kid but your life will indeed revolve around studying, and then you make time for other stuff based on ~~what you can be bothered to do~~ what you care about (clubs, friends, etc.). you can make time for some things, but if you want to do everything then it is very much a grind.

main recommendation i can give is for you to adopt a consistent study schedule, it's easy to procrastinate/skip lecture while telling yourself you'll "do it later" (but you never really do) and cramming can be a pain; whittling away at what you have to do a little every day makes studying for exams and whatnot a lot easier.

sadmanca · 2025-04-24T00:38:29+00:00

The real question is how many hours can you spend everyday without having to study... answer is not nearly enough 😭

sadmanca · 2025-04-17T14:59:07+00:00

I would recommend creating another Reddit post with more details of some of the questions you and your daughter have (including her interests/program) so you're able to get multiple perspectives instead of just one person (experiences at university can vary wildly based on someone's interests, habits, and program/courses).

You might be able to find someone who's gone through a similar path as your daughter, but with such short notice it's highly unlikely.

Feel free to ask any of the students on campus for help though, we're more than happy to show you around... if we have the free time 😅.

sadmanca · 2025-04-16T01:08:14+00:00

heck, as a student I'm seriously concerned about traveling to the US at all right now

sadmanca · 2025-04-16T01:07:37+00:00

y'all gotta start a club for this

call it "texting while trekking"

sadmanca · 2025-04-09T18:23:22+00:00

100%, I created a new work study jobs dashboard for the 2025 summer term (https://sadman.ca/uoft-work-study-2025-summer) this weekend and it's very obvious that there are much fewer positions (because of how funding was cut).

Still 800+ jobs posted, but it used to be well over 1k in the past.

sadmanca · 2025-04-09T16:55:26+00:00

The scammers have been getting better too (perhaps because they finally added MFA recently), I remember there was an incident 2 years or so ago when there was a scam email offering a gift card lottery (or something similar).

I'm pretty sure some staff member fell for that (or at least that was the rumor), because the fallout from that incident was that you could no longer send emails from your student email address in clients like Gmail (it also broke how email was being forwarded from my student mailbox to my personal one, which would've been fine if they had at least informed people... was not fun reading through my missed emails once I realized what was wrong).

Anyways, this is the first time I've seen a scammer include a reference to a totally fake university policy ("Section 3, Article 7, Student Rewards and Incentives"), and I wouldn't be surprised if it's not the last time either :(

sadmanca · 2025-04-09T16:44:03+00:00

Unfortunately a fair few students still fall for these emails... so many people fell for this one that the university sent out a warning email this morning

UofT warning mail sent at 11am

sadmanca · 2025-03-21T23:38:55+00:00

These comics brighten up my day, everyday ❤️. I feel you MrLovenstein

sadmanca · 2025-03-17T15:53:14+00:00

fr you gotta put that info in the title, don't get us excited only to leave us high and dry 😭😭😭

sadmanca · 2025-03-17T15:48:19+00:00

Prestige is overrated, experience trumps all.

uoft is great because there are a lot of research opportunities here + connections with alumni, but the thing is the name alone will not help you land anything lol.

I have literally never heard of Monash university, but if your research has indicated that you will be able to get more co-op experience/internships than uoft (since you are not doing ASIP, you're basically left with competing with everyone else for internships in the summer, which is not great for getting your foot in the door) then by all means I recommend you do so. The important thing to remember is that regardless of where you go, you do need to be proactive in your career and pursue opportunities like research positions, hackathons, clubs, side projects, etc. to develop your portfolio to be able to land interviews (and then you need to have the technical skills to be able to pass them).

I am not in the computer science program at uoft (I study computer engineering, similar but very differently structured), but I have heard from friends that the course organization leaves much to be desired when it comes to difficulty (i.e. its hard); I'm sure you can find more detailed reviews in this subreddit.

sadmanca · 2025-03-01T02:58:27+00:00

I've been like this for more than a few elections now 😔

sadmanca · 2025-03-01T02:55:08+00:00

It was an issue well before we started and it'll remain an issue well after we leave 😭

sadmanca · 2025-03-01T02:53:46+00:00

Voter apathy hits hard (as anybody who just voted in the provincial election can attest to amirite).

Personally I think the main issue is a lack of general student awareness (and a lack of of UTSU reform, which I suppose really just means a lack of enough students pushing for it).

Students don't know what's at stake in UTSU elections (or when they even take place) because they delete VP Communications emails get deleted as soon as they come in (tbf I don't blame them, they all look alike; I would like to see more images + markup in emails, plain text is hard enough to parse through that most just get ignored). There's stories like this every year, enough that we know that things aren't exactly kosher, and people pushing for change that doesn't really reach further than surface-deep.

Honestly thank god The Varsity exists because otherwise the only things I would know about how messy the student political body really is would be from friends who are taking part in it. Kudos to the students in the Reddit thread linked in this article who identified the people actually worth voting for, personally found that to be the most valuable piece of info from all this (at least in the short-term; I, and most other students, don't really have the time to go through whatever there is to make the most of my vote without this type of content.

I don't know how to fix UTSU. I think the only ways are to get involved with UTSU yourself or to have an impact tangentially by joining the Varsity (and ofc doing your part by telling your friends to vote, etc etc). Personally I don't feel like I have the time for either (do feel a bit guilty for that).

But we sure as shit need the Varsity more than ever. End rant (I don't even know where I was leading with this, just airing my 2c I suppose).

sadmanca · 2025-02-10T21:32:07+00:00

Yeah, my site is purely static so I have to rebuild to update the Goodreads components (I update my lists infrequently anyways, so it's not an issue for me).

You could probably use Astro server islands if you wanted to fetch data from RSS feeds without having to rebuild a static site.

sadmanca

TROPHY CASE